


don't read the last page

by daisysusan



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Dirty Talk, Discussion of Fantasies, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, jk there's a little bit of plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:02:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29813676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/pseuds/daisysusan
Summary: Sometimes, it's easier to say things with your body, and sometimes that makes it easier to say them with your mouth, too.
Relationships: Alec Hardy/Ellie Miller
Comments: 4
Kudos: 61





	don't read the last page

**Author's Note:**

> Ambiguously post s3, in my head, but no actual mention of anything after s2.

“I used to think about this,” Alec says, the words muffled by her collarbone. He’s already left at least one mark on it, scraping his teeth across an area he sucked on almost viciously hard moments before. Ellie’ll have to be careful to wear high-collared shirts the next few days.

“Used to?” she retorts. There isn’t nearly as much bite to it as she would like. “Is that meant to imply you don’t think about it anymore?”

It’s hard to summon anything close to the outrage he used to stir in her, or even to produce a weak impression of her still-frequent annoyance, when she’s got beard burn on her neck and his fingers toying with the top of her knickers, but she likes to think she manages something resembling incredulity. Alec, at least, makes a frustrated noise against her skin.

“Obviously not,” he says, the tone so familiar she half-expects him to call her Miller.

Not that it would be the first time. It’s taken some getting used to, being on a first name basis. She’d called him sir once, nearly derailing a promising evening because they’d both started laughing too much to keep on. 

“Obviously I still think about it,” he grumbles, and she laughs despite herself. He’s so easy to wind up, even now. Even when he’s got her in his bed, even when it isn’t the first time she’s been there.

“Good,” she says. Her voice breaks as his fingers skate over her knickers across her clit, and she doesn’t need to be able to see his face to know he looks smug. He’s insufferable sometimes, and maybe she truly would not suffer him if he weren’t quite so good at— _this_.

She nearly laughs again, just at how ludicrous the thought is that all he brings to this is his sexual prowess.

“Ellie,” he says softly, almost a growl. She feels teeth against her skin, an edge of sharpness that makes her lose her train of thought for a few breaths. She should be touching him, should wind her hands through his hair or splay them across his back.

“When?” she manages to ask.

He kisses across her ribcage before he answers, trailing his lips over the top of her breast and teasing one of her nipples for so long she nearly forgets about the question entirely.

“From nearly the start,” he says, and he actually sounds sheepish. Two seconds ago, he had her nipple in his mouth and now he sounds sheepish. It’s more than a little endearing, which she absolutely cannot tell him. Knowing that she likes him is already too much power. 

“I was married,” she says, taken aback, and then, like it’s a completely unrelated thought, “I’d have killed you on the spot.”

“Wouldn’t have taken much,” Alec says. “The things I had in mind, not sure you’d have needed to put in much work to put an end to me.”

It takes Ellie a moment to sort out what he means, distracted by the warmth of his mouth where he’s put it back against the side of her breast. “Did you just make a joke about dying from a sex-induced heart attack _in the middle of sex_?”

Alec nips at her side, just hard enough that she knows his teeth will leave an impression. She’s going to be covered in marks tomorrow, like a teenager who doesn’t know when to put a stop to things. “Might have done,” he says.

She smacks the top of his head, or rather she planned to before she got distracted dragging her fingers through his hair. “You’re impossible,” she murmurs, and he just hums, warm vibrations against her skin. 

“Not a concern any longer,” he says. “If I was going to keel over from an excess of sex I think I already would have done.”

It’s not a bad point. Right now he’s putting in nearly all the work, but she’s done more than her fair share plenty of times. Still, the humor of it largely eludes her, and when he’s not got his hand in her pants she’ll probably be more upset that he’s making jokes about dying.

God, when did he get his hand inside her knickers? She doesn’t remember it happening, but his fingers are there now, sliding between her folds. The heel of his hand brushes her clit, just for a split second, and she arches toward the touch reflexively. Alec pulls his hand away entirely—cruel—and pushes her knickers down instead. 

Ellie weighs her dignity against her desire to have him fucking touch her again and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter wins out.

“Alec,” she whispers. “Do that again.”

He lets the elastic of her knickers snap around her legs. “Take your knickers off? You’re only wearing one pair, unless you want me to put those back on you.”

She groans, frustration rather than arousal, and he laughs. It’s embarrassing, how much she missed laughing in bed with someone. “Touch me again, you bastard.”

“If you insist,” he says. Still, he takes his time getting there, touching her legs, the inside of her knees, brushing lightly against the back of one until she nearly giggles, high and breathy. She squirms, half ticklish and half impatient, and he tuts at her, reaching down to get her knickers all the way off.

Seeing him grinning up at her from the end of the bed, smug and just a little flushed—she’s not used to that bit yet. Doesn’t know if she ever will be, since she never expected it in the first place. 

Now that he’s got her completely naked, even though he’s still wearing his own pants and, she’s pretty certain, his socks, he crawls back up the bed. Balanced on one arm above her, he touches her cheek before he leans in to kiss her again.

“Glad we got this part sorted in the end,” he says when he pulls back to catch his breath. She’s lost for a moment, having to think all the way back to a few minutes ago when all her focus is on where he’s going to put his hands next. But she’s pleased too, difficult as it is to put that into words. Alec’s hardly the easiest person to talk to at the best of times, try as he might, and sometimes it’s easier to say things without actually _saying_ them. Ellie nods instead of forcing herself to speak; he’ll understand, in that slightly terrifying way he has of always understanding what she needs.

Even when he’s refusing to give it to her, sliding his hand over her hip down the outside of her thigh instead of between her legs. 

“You said you’d touch me,” she says. Whines, really, her voice coming out all thready instead of demanding.

“I am touching you,” he replies, squeezing her thigh. 

“You know what I mean,” she grumbles. Tries to grumble, her breath catching in the middle when he pinches the inside of her thigh. It hurts, but it hurts in that way that flirts with being pleasure. She wouldn’t complain if it did it again, except that it would mean he still wasn’t touching her clit, or slipping his fingers inside her. 

Like he’s read her mind, he pinches her thigh again, and then kisses her quickly, not nearly the way she wants to be kissed at a time like this. He’s clearly holding out—she knows how he likes touching her, that much has been made clear to her quite a few times over—and that means he wants something.

She thinks about what he said a few moments ago—he used to think about her. Before they started this, even before she would have entertained the idea of starting this. He wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t want to talk about it, she doesn’t think; he’s not that kind of man. There’s a deliberateness to his actions, even when they seem half-cocked and scattershot.

Not that she would mind hearing about it, either. Even now, or perhaps especially now, there’s a real headiness to being wanted, especially the kind of wanting that comes with illicit fantasies and years of longing. 

“Fine,” Ellie says, after letting the moment drag out, just to make Alec sweat. She doesn’t sound nearly as resigned as she means to, too breathless by half. “You should tell me what you used to think about doing to me sexually, back when I hated your guts.”

Alec hums again, and it sounds like he’s laughing a bit. She ought to be annoyed by that, perhaps, but she isn’t at all. He’s worked his way down her body now, left a trail of kisses across her stomach and now he’s worrying at the skin covering her hip. She knows where this is headed.

“Well,” he says, dragging the word out. “For starters, just about every time you looked at me like I was the scum of the earth, I used to think about getting you up against one of those infernal glass walls and eating you out until you screamed, just right in front of everyone.”

“Jesus,” Ellie says. “Is that all?”

“Not at all,” he says. “That was just the first and most frequent one. I wanted to have you completely at my mercy.” He pauses, kisses her hip once. “Wanted you to look at me like I wasn’t a worthless sack of shit.”

“Why?” She didn’t mean to ask, but the question slips out. She was married, then, and he certainly didn’t seem like he’d fancied her, either. That took quite a while.

He doesn’t answer straightaway, taking his time arranging her legs and dragging his blunt nails up the inside of her thighs instead. She whines, helpless, and then gasps when he ghosts his fingers across her clit, across her vulva.

“Dunno, to be honest,” he says, his voice gone soft. “I wanted you to be impressed with me, I suppose.”

She raises her eyebrows, even though he won’t see. “Impressed with your sexual prowess?”

“Didn’t seem like you were going to be impressed by my professional credentials,” he points out. She can’t argue with that, but the idea that he was compensating for that—dealing with that—by imagining being on his knees for her, his mouth pressed to her, licking at her until she screamed. That’s something she’s going to need a while to get used to. 

“How’d it start?” she asks.

“What, thinking about shagging you?” His voice is rougher than it was earlier, more turned on. “Probably with a dream.”

“Cliché,” she says, and he just laughs.

“Suppose,” he allows. “Nice dreams, though.”

His hands are back up at her waist now, fingers trailing shapes across the sensitive skin of her stomach. She curls a hand around the back of his neck, pulls him back in to kiss. His mouth tastes familiar, tastes the same as it has every other time she’s kissed him, and the noise he makes into the kiss is familiar too. There’s a bittersweetness to it, when she dwells on that part. Been a long time since she had this kind of familiarity with anyone.

“Imagine so,” she says. It’s muffled by his mouth, but she’s already broken the kiss so she shifts just enough to kiss across his jaw, rough with stubble.

He shaved once, at her request, early on. Or rather—at her hint. Her insinuation. She never asked outright but he did it anyway. An impulse of wanting to impress her, he admitted later. It hadn’t stuck, in either sense, especially after she admitted that it was too strange to look at him without the scruff. God but he’d been smug about that, and she’d had atrocious beard burn as soon as it grew back. He’d bought her a scarf for her troubles, and she’d nearly chucked it at him when she’d seen how self-satisfied he looked.

“Tell me about them,” she murmurs into his ear.

“If you insist,” he says. He clears his throat, kisses the side of her neck once. “The first one I remember was what I already told you, eating you out with your back up against one of those walls. Until you just completely lost it, screaming my name. I’d make you come three times, or maybe four, until you were just dripping wet all down your thighs.” He hums softly, shifts to kiss at her clavicle. He’s worrying at a spot he already sucked a mark into earlier, and the dull ache of it makes her whimper.

“Yes,” he murmurs. “Like that, until you were whimpering and you could barely stand up. Sounded just like that in my imagination, too.”

“God,” Ellie manages.

Alec huffs out a laugh. “Definitely thought about you saying that. Sometimes I thought about answering by telling you he wasn’t there, that it was just me so you should use my name.”

“That’s even more cliché,” she says. He doesn’t even acknowledge it.

“After that I’d usually fuck you properly,” he continues. Ellie swears under her breath.

“Some stamina we’ve got, in your imagination.”

“Well, we were younger, then.”

She snorts, the kind of unattractive noise she worried about more when she was younger. He slides his fingers back between her legs, where she’s so wet now that she can hear the way they slip against her. Her breath catches, and she whimpers when he lets his fingers just barely catch against her vagina. 

“You liked hearing that,” he says. It’s not a question, not that he needs to ask when he can see the way she’s reacting to it.

“‘Course I did,” she says. He’s touching her clit now, light circles on it, and she’s going to forget how to form words soon. “Why wouldn’t I like the idea of you going down on me until I can’t stand up anymore? Sounds like a great time.”

He thumbs firmly across her clit, just once, and she gasps, arches off the bed. He’s sitting back on his heels now, just watching her as she writhes on the bed. Too far away to kiss, too far away even for her to touch easily. She misses it, dragging her hands across his skin, feeling the way his pulse thuds in his neck and his wrists, quick but steady even at moments like this.

“You want to hear more?” he asks.

She nods, not even bothering to attempt forming words. Alec’s thumb swirls across her clit again, lighter this time, and she presses into it. “Please,” she says, the kind of ambiguous plea she knows he’ll use to torment her.

And indeed he does—“Please tell you more or please touch you again?” he asks.

“Honestly?” she says. “Either one.”

The way he chuckles, warm and pleased and fond, does something to her stomach that’s got nothing at all to do with sex and everything to do with the kind of things they aren’t talking about.

“Alright then,” he says, the sounds all warm and rounded in his mouth. She’s not expecting it when he shifts himself around so that he can kiss her, one arm braced against the bed next to her. “How’s both sound, then?” he says, a breath against her mouth before he presses their lips back together.

The noise Ellie makes, rough and guttural, is one that she’d prefer not to dwell on too much. It’s not the kind of thing that one typically thinks of as sexy, more in the vein of raw desperation than curated desire. But Alec swallows it from her lips nonetheless, makes a pleased noise, and she curls her arms around his back to keep him there, not that he’s putting up a fight.

“Dreamed about it after that stupid hotel,” he murmurs. One of his fingers is sliding around the edge of her, almost inside but not quite there yet, and she squirms helplessly. 

“Christ,” Ellie says. If her hands weren’t occupied, she’d actually rub the bridge of her nose. At least Alec has the good sense to look sheepish about that one.

“It was on my mind already,” he says, defensive.

“I’ll say,” she mutters. “You did just tell me you used to think about having me in the middle of all our coworkers when I was married.”

He doesn’t even answer her, just hums against her mouth and slips his finger all the way in, letting her gasp get muffled. She nips at his lip, just to make a point, but the way he shudders makes her think it may not have been the most effective. 

“I didn’t say I was proud of it,” he says. God, he’s such a bullshitter.

“You didn’t have to.” The retort would have been more effective if it weren’t for the way her voice cracked as he started moving his hand, a steady rhythm that she’s sure he knows all too well will drive her mad. Not that it’s going to take much now, not with how he’s got her worked up. 

He’s got another finger inside her now, and when she shifts she can feel the heel of his hand against her clit, pressure for a moment and then gone.

“Well,” he says, drawing the word out. “I wasn’t proud of it at the time. Now, I think it was quite prescient of me.”

She could hit him, probably, if he weren’t making it hard for her to focus on any movement other than rocking her hips toward his hand, the familiar instinctive motion that’s still somehow occupying her whole mind. He’s shifting the angle of his hand every few seconds, changing the way she has to move to get the right pressure. It’s just enough to keep her on the edge without tipping over, heat building and building and building but never quite enough. 

He’s grinning against her mouth, she can feel it. Smug bastard.

“Let me come,” she says, the words nearly gritted out. 

“Oh, is that what you want?” he asks. She’s certain he’s aiming to sound self-satisfied but all he sounds is desperate, the edges of his words gone rough and almost slurred with need.

“It’s what you want too,” she manages to say, somehow, and then he’s moving his hand again, rhythmic and perfect and every thrust has him brushing across her clit and that’s it, that’s what she’s been asking for.

She comes with Alec humming against her lips, so clearly pleased with himself and she can’t even begrudge him, not when she’s arching off the bed, gasping his name and shaking for a few moments before she comes down.

He licks his fingers when he pulls them out of her, obscene and, frankly, obscenely hot.

“Christ,” she says, still feeling too languid from the orgasm to work up anything beyond satisfaction. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

He pulls his fingers out of his mouth with an exaggerated smack. “I certainly hope not. At least not after only one orgasm.” 

“I’ll do my best,” she says. “You were telling me about, what, four? Five? I should hold you to that.”

She’s fairly certain he’d try, too, if she let him. More skeptical that it would work, that she could come five times in one night the way she evidently was in his imagination, but lord knows he’s a stubborn bastard. He’d try. 

“Were there any others?” she asks, and he frowns at her. “Fantasies, I mean. Ways you imagined having your way with me when I thought you were just some arsehole who stole my job and we both thought I was happily married?”

Alec clears his throat, drags his hand up her side. She reaches around, catches his hand to curl their fingers together. “Nothing interesting,” he says. “Just the regular kind of thing, you riding me until I forgot my own name, fucking you so hard we nearly broke the bed. That kind of thing.” He pauses for a moment, and then squeezes her hand. “Later, all sorts of pathetic sorts of fantasies of kissing you good night and cooking you dinner. Not really sexy.” 

She smiles. “Speak for yourself,” she murmurs. “I think it’s sexy when you cook dinner.” She sucks in a slow breath, trying to decide how much of herself she’s going to reveal tonight, which pieces she doesn’t need to keep a tight hold of anymore. “I like being looked after. ‘S’nice to be taken care of.”

The way Alec breathes out her name, warm on a sigh, and then leans in to kiss her again—that’s the kind of thing a hell of a lot of fantasies are made of. It’s the kind of thing that feels like a lot more than they’ve put into words here. Maybe it feels like too much, for this exact moment. It’s something like a relief when Ellie curls a hand around the back of his neck and deepens the kiss, and when he sinks into it, tongue behind her teeth and fingers pinching at her nipple, still damp from where he licked them clean. 

She bites his lip, harder than she would usually but that’s how they’ve always been, affection with a sharp edge to it. It’s what makes them work, having the rough bits, the sharp edges, the ways they bristle and prickle and still end up shaping themselves to each other. He groans into the kiss, breaks them apart just enough that he can sink his teeth into her lip as payback. A small, petulant part of her wishes that didn’t make her moan, wants to keep the satisfaction of it from him. But that part of her hasn’t been particularly forceful for years now.

Letting him see her has certainly worked out a lot better for her than keeping herself hidden away from him.

They’re not kissing now, not really, more just breathing against each other’s mouth. Alec says something that sounds suspiciously like her name, his tongue curling nearly into her mouth as he does it. It’s not the first time they’ve stumbled into this sort of intimacy without really seeking it out; they’ve been in each other’s pockets in so many ways for so long that it’s probably unavoidable. How could she let him see so many pieces of her and then tuck all that away when he takes her to bed?

Still, she can’t find it in herself to let the moment drag on indefinitely. She presses up, kissing him again. There’s options, from here—rolling them and having her way with him, or just kissing him senseless, until he’s so desperate that he fucks her properly, or letting him drag the foreplay on for as long as he likes, leaving her overstimulated and wobbly and still, somehow, desperate.

Alec makes the decision for her, grinning as he pulls away from her mouth. He looks unforgivably smug, which means she must look entirely disheveled. “I was planning to spend a while longer on you, but would you mind if we skipped ahead a bit? I’m quite impatient.”

Ellie laughs, feeling the way her ribcage shakes against him. “No complaints from me,” she says. She only has a few moments to catch her breath before he’s rearranging them both.

He’s balancing above her, one hand wrapped around the base of his cock, when Ellie says, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I thought about you as well.”

“What?” Alec says, rough and choked and extraordinarily satisfying to hear.

“Shagging you,” she says. She’s aiming for smooth, glib, cool, and she isn’t at all certain that she manages it.

“Ah,” he manages. He’s clearly also aiming to take this one in stride, and is just as clearly surprised. She’s rather smug about it, because she so seldom manages to wrong-foot him, and it’s a trial to keep from laughing. Now’s not the moment for that, not when he’s about to actually fuck her, when she’s been desperately wanting him to all evening.

“Didn’t expect that, did you?” she asks, enjoying the way he splutters. “You’re a good looking man, shouldn’t be such a surprise that I would’ve thought about it.”

“Christ, Ellie,” he mutters. “You’re a menace, you know that?”

“Learned from the best,” she says, and he just shakes his head, playing at despairing of her. Maybe once she’d have believed it, but not for years now, and especially not when they’re like this, tangled together and sweaty and somehow, absurdly, always on the brink of laughter.

He drops his head to her neck, breathing against her skin harshly. She rather thinks he won’t be able to hold the position for very long and, in fact, he doesn’t; he collapses on top of her and rolls to the side, trailing his fingers down her arm. It gives her the ridiculous urge to reach for his hand, to lace their fingers together, and she nearly catches herself before she remembers that that’s what these moments are _for_.

His fingers are warm and firm against hers, and she swallows against the unexpected rush of emotion. “When?” he asks, some of the desperation gone out of his voice. The word is edged with tenderness, not harsh with need. 

Sometimes, Ellie’s just fed up with having to walk on eggshells around every aspect of her love life before she fell into bed with Alec—with Hardy, really, since that’s still what he to her is so much of the time. Other times, she knows she still needs the delicate treatment, that few things can shatter her like an inopportune reminder of her past.

“Not as soon as you,” she says, delicate. Diplomatic. It’s one thing to reference her marriage in passing, quick and then done, but this isn’t that.

“No,” Alec says, warm and low. “I shouldn’t think so.” He pauses, kisses the side of her shoulder. “But when?”

“Sandbrook,” she says, the word like a sigh. “That bloody hotel.”

“Cliché,” he murmurs. It sets her off laughing, the tension building in her muscles shattering with it.

“It’s a cliché for a reason,” she manages to say. “Getting a hotel and there’s only one bed? It’s basically a porno.” 

Next to her, she can almost feel Alec leering. “Course,” she says. “Would’ve been sexier if you weren’t at death’s door and I wasn’t terrified that even looking at you wrong would get us accused of having an affair again.”

He’s sliding his hand up and down her arm again, steady and soothing. The discovery of this side of him, in fits and starts over years, taking her by surprise every time—it still ripples through her memory to the first times he turned it on her. Ellie turns her head when she feels Alec’s hand cup the side of her neck, wriggling down the bed until she can kiss him softly. “I’m about to ruin the mood,” she says against his lips, and he shakes his head.

“Not possible while you’re still naked in my bed.”

One corner of her mouth twists up, wry. He kisses her this time, the corner of her mouth and then her cheek and her forehead, clearly sensing her skepticism.

“I woke up in that awful hotel bed, stiff and barely less tired than I was when I went to sleep, and all I could think about was how much I wished having someone next to me every time, and then about how much I missed morning sex.” She pauses, letting her hand fall against his chest—bare, just a little damp with sweat, a scattering of hair at the top but not enough to obscure the scars. “I wasn’t thinking, really, but there was an instant when I woke up and the bed was warm in that way it is when you’re not alone, and I thought about just rolling over and going for it. Like habit or muscle memory or what have you.”

Alec clears his throat. “And then you remembered—”

“Yeah,” she says. “All the reasons that wasn’t going to happen.”

“Ellie,” he says. His voice is soft, the kind of tenderness she can still barely tolerate from anyone, much less him. She shakes her head, and he nods, steady and reassuring.

“‘Sides,” she murmurs. “Turns out I was wrong.” It’s the closest she’s come so far to acknowledging that this could be something more than they’ve given name to. 

The noise Alec makes now is still soft, but it’s pleased in a way he wasn’t a moment ago. The wanting is coming back, as well.

“Weren’t you going to fuck me?” she asks, and this time she’s fairly certain she manages the impishness she’s aiming for.

He shrugs, all false casualness that’s clearly matching her. “Suppose I was,” he says. “You still interested?”

“What do you think?” she says, and that’s really all that’s left to say, though she’s certain they’ll find at least a few more words tonight.

He slides into her more gently than she suspects he would have if she hadn’t stopped him with conversation earlier, but she still gasps at the feel of it. She can feel herself arching off the bed, pressing into him, trying to keep him close. The movement feels instinctual, a base urge to get their bodies as close together as possible. 

The bit where he groans when she does it doesn’t hurt, either.

Deep inside her, he’s still for a moment. She can feel him breathing against her neck, hunched over her and panting and clearly straining to keep still.

“C’mon,” she urges. “Said I wanted you to fuck me, didn’t I?”

He doesn’t respond, his face still pressed against her skin. He’s probably trying to decide if he’s going to be bloody _nice_ to her, gentle or what passes for it on him, and she’s got to decide if she wants that or if she just wants him to move. They can always be careful with each other after.

She’s on the brink of pressing him again, probably on the verge of begging if she’s honest, when he moves, nearly all the way out and then pushes back in, forceful this time. It feels like she’s had the breath pushed out of her, suddenly gasping like there’s not enough air in the room.

“Please,” she says, evidently begging despite the fact that she’s getting what she wants. Perhaps not her most dignified moment, but then sex is seldom full of those, and, in Ellie’s experience, good sex isn’t ever dignified. Too much panting and sweating and swearing all around.

Alec’s swearing now, muffled and clearly out of breath, and Ellie does too when he slams his hips against her. He’s in her in the way that makes her feel like she’s filled to the brim, unable to focus on anything but his cock deep inside her. She has the visceral urge to keep him there, squeezing her legs around his back and her inner muscles around his cock.

But he’s moving again already, sharp and not quite rhythmic, and she can feel herself moving with him, rocking her hips to change the angle so he’s brushing against her clit.

It’s not enough, it’s not going to be enough to get her there again, but every light touch is making her shudder and gasp, making her forget the rest of the world, and isn’t that what she’s here for? To be swallowed up by the sensation of it, unable to think about anything but the drag of Alec’s cock and the shivery way she’s inching ever closer to orgasm again. 

He groans, and his rhythm—such as it is—falters. He picks it back up after a breath, a lull just long enough that Ellie groans when he resumes, no longer prepared for the roughness of it. 

She feels a kiss against her shoulder, quick and soft, and then the angle between them has changed again. He’s not quite so deep in her and, oh, it’s a loss for a blink, until she realizes he’s worked one of his hands between them, pressing arrhythmically on her clit. She’s warm all over, the friction of his thrusts already bringing her close to the edge and he’s there too, she can tell by the way his breathing’s gone shallow and harsh in her ear.

“Just a bit more,” she manages, and hell, she’s breathless too, almost lightheaded with it. His fingers press harder, and he slams his hips against her just a few more times before he’s coming.

Ellie’s not certain how she manages the coordination to finish herself off, just a few harsh circles of her own fingers between her legs but last she remembered they’d been holding tight to Alec’s arm and the sheets. Still, she’s glad for the relief of it, the shattering of the tension and the way they end up boneless and tangled on the sheet.

She’ll be chilly soon enough, cooling sweat and the duvet nowhere to be seen, but she isn’t yet. She’ll need to clean herself up soon as well, but she’s not ready to push Alec aside and get herself, wobbly knees and all, to the toilet.

“Bloody hell, Miller,” he says, and it sounds exactly like the way he says it when they’re working, when she’s told him some tale about small town life that he finds utterly unfathomable even though he’s lived here, in a small town, for a good while now. She laughs, helpless and still breathless.

“You’d think I’d just done a shit job parking your car, not shagged your brains out,” she says, which sets him off laughing as well. He shakes his head at her when he’s managed to stop, and she catches herself watching him in a way she doesn’t usually. His lips are red, and he’s still flushed, uneven on his cheeks though not quite all the way to blotchy.

He must notice her watching, because the kiss he presses to her shoulder is—it’s something. Not something she’s putting into words yet.

Instead, she does drag herself to get cleaned up. She’s only out of the bed for a couple minutes at most, but she catches herself missing it, the warmth and the laziness and the easy comfort of touch. It wouldn’t be right to say she hurries back, but it wouldn’t be wrong, either, and she settles back next to him as soon as she can.

“I’m quite fond of you,” he says, some time later.

“You’re a twat,” she replies. He grins at her, unrepentant. She’s still unused to seeing him smile, a rare occurrence even now. It’s not unpleasant, though. Might even be worth going out of her way to see it more often.

Ellie’s going to consider it.

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from tswift's new year's day which i mention mostly because it's "don't read the last page but i stay ..." and i like how that feels in the context of this story.
> 
> this was a no-britpick-we-die-like-men story but please do tell me if i've unknowingly dropped some appalling americanism in there.


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